1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of telecommunications. More particularly, the present invention relates to a method for recording media content onto a storage medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
Piracy of audio program material, or content, is a significant problem facing particularly the recording industry. The advent of digital music compact disks (CDs) has meant that perfect copies of audio content are readily available to so-called "pirates," who can reproduce the content without degradation and sell the pirated content at below-market rates. The growth of the Internet has exacerbated the piracy problem, providing such pirates a distribution channel directly to customers who are eager to purchase audio content for a bargain.
Music CDs are manufactured from master content recorded and mixed at a recording studio. Such CDs might contain 500 megabytes of digital audio data representing, for example, 45 minutes of audio program material. Since so much data is required to represent a typical "album" of audio content (e.g., music), distributing such content over the Internet is impractical without using an audio compression technique. Advances in audio compression technology have permitted transmission of compressed audio content over the Internet, with decompression performed by a recipient of such content, with little or no loss of audio content quality.
What is needed is a way control distribution of media content over the Internet for preventing piracy of the media content.